Where can I walk the “dog” – Newspaper Kommersant No. 169 (7370) of 09/14/2022

From December 1, government agencies may be required to use e-mail addresses “using domain names and network addresses located in the Russian national domain zone,” according to a recently published draft government decree. At the federal level, officials have long been corresponding with addresses using the same domain in the .ru zone as the websites of their government agencies. In local authorities, everything is less clear.

At the level of cities and villages, an address registered on any free service, including a foreign one, is often used as an official email. So, on the website of Reutov, near Moscow, the address of the head of the city is given on gmail.com (Google), and the address of the administration of the Nikulinsky rural settlement in the Tyumen region is indicated on hotmail.com (Microsoft). Such mailboxes were registered long before the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, sometimes for decades: Microsoft stopped issuing addresses on hotmail.com in 2013. Against this background, the Krasnodar Territory is different: back in 2017, its governor legally banned officials from conducting official correspondence through any free services, including the Russian Yandex and Mail.ru.

The explanatory note of the Ministry of Digital Development to the draft resolution states that it is necessary to transfer addresses to the national domain zone to “ensure information security”. The requirement of “Russification” looks logical in the current conditions, but only if you do not know how email works. After all, there is no unambiguous connection between the domain used in the mail address and the server that processes the letters. Nothing prevents me from registering a domain ending in .ru and connecting it to a foreign provider’s mail server. The opposite is also true: you can set up a server on the territory of Russia and under the control of Russian legal entities, but create addresses with arbitrary domains on it.

As Andrei Vorobyov, director of the .RU/.РФ Coordination Center, explained to me, an email address can be decomposed into three parts: a domain (what comes after @), an MX record (a line in the domain name system that points to the domain of the mail server) and The IP address of the server, which can belong to both Russian and foreign blocks of addresses. Only under the condition that all three levels belong to the Russian Internet space, we can talk about the belonging of the mail service for government agencies to the national network space.

So if the Ministry of Digital Transformation really intends to transfer the mail of government agencies to the national space, then the initiative in its current form is more of an image move than a measure to ensure information security.